Building projects that increase the visibility of this field of work in arts and non-arts sectors.

Projects

BUILT

Project Core Question: Where will we live? & Who are we responsible for?

In the course of the
75-minute performance, audience/participants talked to their neighbors,
master-planned cities from scratch, and delineated their own priorities
through a series of critical questions too often left to a city’s
planners, rather than its residents.

With its unusual theatrical approach to amplifying civic dialogue, BUILT
engaged local residents, including those from areas geographically or
socioeconomically underrepresented in city planning decisions, and
provoked them to think about how their communities are planned, and how
they might take more active roles in that process. BUILT also
generated strong interest and enthusiasm among professionals from
Portland’s city planning agency, who incorporated some of the strategies
that the game proposed to have the public engaged in discussions about
land use and resources.Video from performance at TBA at PICA in 2008: https://vimeo.com/5337210 (see 4:15, for instance)HOW TO END POVERTY IN 90 MINUTES

Sojourn Theatre’s How to End Poverty in 90 minutes (with 199 people you
may or may not know) is a devised, community specific participatory
theatre event that explores issues of poverty and democracy by
allocating $1000 from the box office at every performance to a local
organization that fights poverty. The audience decides where the money
goes.

ISLANDS OF MILWAUKEE

A city-wide process blending engagement, performance,
installation, participatory research, cross-sector partnerships, online
activity and in-home encounters.
Project Core Question: How do we create a more connected Milwaukee inclusive of all residents as they age?

- "Artistic housecalls:" The Arts At Home/IoM Team worked on the pilot project from 2012-2014.
We created partnerships and built systems to bring meaningful engagement
to elders living alone. Artists offered "artistic housecalls" and
built on/with the creativity of the elders to make radio segments,
performances and art installations. See our report and the
collaborations page for stories of all our incredible encounters! - Crossings: Street performances to create a city that sees & stops for pedestrians.

CPCP defines Civic Practice as arts-based partnership
work that is developed in service to the needs of a partner organization
or agency that does not have an arts-centered mission. Artists engage
in this work with regularity, but the work isn’t always visible- not
within larger community conversations, and not within artistic
disciplines themselves. There isn’t a shared vocabulary, and artists and
communities can end up working in isolation, often without access to
networks of support and opportunities to develop their own practice.